


Cast A Spell (On My Heart)

by surprisepink



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Annette Week (Fire Emblem), F/F, Secret Crush, brief description of a head injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-13
Updated: 2020-05-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:22:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24163567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surprisepink/pseuds/surprisepink
Summary: "You sit there, Annie, and let me get you a bandage just in case!" she said in her usual cheerful tone, as if Annette hadn’t just had a near-death experience (not really) and then quite possibly discovered that her best friend was secretly a witch (really!)....As a child Annette discovered that she could create breezes with her mind; after sixteen years of believing she was alone, it turns out that there might be someone else with a similar power closer than she ever expected.
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic/Mercedes von Martritz
Comments: 6
Kudos: 47





	Cast A Spell (On My Heart)

Although she was five that day, Annette still remembers it now. It’s the kind of memory that manages to stick in her mind clear as the day it happened even though the hours before and after are a blur. She'd been sitting on the front porch, shielded from the bright summer sun by a wide hat and a generous application of sunblock. In her left hand was an ice cream bar shaped like a cartoon character, already half eaten and well on its way to staining her tongue blue. On the right there was a bubble wand that she swirled around in a dish of soap and water. Her mother was close by, absorbed in a paperback. Her father was… it was hard to say. At work, probably. He was always at work.

Making satisfactory bubbles was a challenge at her young age, especially since her lips were sticky with sugar and the air was still and heavy, without the breeze that could have assisted her. Still, she dipped the wand, then blew; dipped, blew; dipped, blew. They weren't the big, beautiful ones that some of her friends could make, but they were hers.

_Still, it would be nice,_ she thought, or something along those lines, _if they would go higher_.

Then there was a breeze, and her mother made a small noise of surprise as the pages of her book suddenly began to flutter wildly. The newest bubble went up, up, up, until it was out of sight.

Her eyes widened in delight, because she was too young to realize how odd it was that such a strong breeze came out of nowhere, but just old enough to realize that it was something beautiful.

Again and again, she blew bubbles. The ice cream bar was soon forgotten and left to melt into a sticky puddle on the steps. And again and again, the bubbles rose up and away, disappearing into the sky. Then they began to swirl around her, circling her body in neat, even loops. That was when she realized that the bubbles were _hers_ and the wind was _hers_ and she could do this _forever_ if she wanted.

Annette was five when she learned she could use magic.

There were no lessons, no schools, no way to really _learn_ magic formally -- nothing like that existed, as far as she could tell. But there was her, alone and determined to master the wind she could conjure with her mind. First it was tiny yet precise breezes, then gusts strong enough to keep kites and toy airplanes afloat as she progressed through grade school. Eventually that led to powerful gales that didn't have much use, but she always kept in the back of her mind just in case she needed them.

She eventually learned she could heal as well, but only small bruises and papercuts. But that was a skill that had its own uses, considering how often her nose was buried in a pile of very mundane textbooks and, after her very normal homework was done, a variety of books, magazines, encyclopedias. Anything that might tell her more about witches, the elements, magic. Most of it was fiction, but still she read whatever she could get her hands on, hoping to learn more about people like her.

This was her power and she had gradually come to realize that it might _only_ be hers, since nothing she read seemed quite _right_. Still, maybe someday she’d find another.

...

Seventeen years later, everything changed thanks to the woman she cared about more than anybody else in her small, cozy world.

Mercie didn't _know_ Annette was in love with her, although Annette had practiced telling her in the privacy of her bedroom at least a dozen times. She'd tried long confessions and short ones, had tried reading poems and sonnets and writing her own, but nothing really fit. She'd looked at herself in the mirror, beet red at even the thought of doing this for real, and tried to explain the depth of her feelings. And still nothing felt right, because Mercedes was gentle, elegant, and well-spoken and Annette was _none_ of these things even though the two of them had been inseparable for years. All Annette had was a sense of curiosity -- nosiness, her mother called it -- and a strong worth ethic, and neither of those made it any easier to come up with the proper way to explain her feelings.

She'd met Mercedes when she was in middle school and had immediately taken to her. Only as an adult did she begin to realize that she'd been a clingy child, eager for the big sister she never had, and Mercedes, not much older than her, had been kind enough to happily accept the role that was requested of her. She was an only child, and when her father left, her mother ended up working long, late hours. Mercedes had been the daughter of a family friend and was asked to keep an eye on her, and they had become fast friends themselves, their bond only growing as they grew up together.

In college, Annette realized that she was in love as she watched Mercedes stir a splash of macadamia milk into her vanilla coffee. Mercedes had been patiently listening to her ramble on about whether she should audition for the ensemble of a student musical. She was looking her straight in the eye even as she stirred, and nodded along, apparently enraptured in Annette's thoughts about whether it fit into her busy schedule. All at once, Annette realized she wanted to be like this forever. She wanted to have a cozy apartment with a full pantry and the windows lined with herb plants, and she wanted to drink coffee with Mercedes every morning until they were old and grey. She wanted to tell Mercedes about magic, and she wanted to see Mercedes giggle with delight as Annette used the subtlest of breezes to lift her skirt as she walked down the aisle on their wedding day, and she wanted Mercedes to tell her her powers were amazing and that she loved them and loved _her_ too.

And that was a realization that Annette had been living with for two years in secret. The thought of Mercedes learning what was in her heart stayed simply a fantasy. 

But one night Annette was at Mercedes' apartment, where she slept just as often as she did in her own dorm room, practicing for her solo part in the fifth student musical of her college career. The steps were beginning to come naturally (and thank goodness for that, since she had been up until five am the previous morning practicing) and Mercedes was clapping along to the music. And then Annette misjudged the placement of the coffee table and somehow tripped and fell face first into it. Then all she could see and smell and feel was _blood_ , trickling down her face and into her eyes, and she heard a muffled shout and wondered if she was dying as her vision filled with red. She felt Mercedes' arms around her, one cradling her and the other pressing the hem of her own shirt to Annette's forehead, which did little to stop the blood and absolutely nothing to stop the throbbing pain in her skull.

And then it was fine.

Her forhead still felt warm, but it wasn't the hot searing pain that had been there only a moment before. She thought briefly that she might still be dying, but now that she was at least dying in Mercedes' arms she had become warm with affection for her. Slowly -- it felt slow, but was probably only a few seconds -- she opened her eyes. They were filled with a light, bright and white like a lightbulb held right up to her face only comforting, not searing the way a real electric light would be.

Annette's heart began to speed up as she realized what had to be happening. The light looked familiar, similar to what she could conjure with her own hands, but bigger, brighter, warmer. Did that mean...

"Annie, are you okay now?"

And she snapped out of her thoughts and back into reality, the light gone without a trace. It was replaced only by Mercedes' worried face.

"Uh," said Annette. "What was that?"

"You hit your head on my coffee table."

"And then?"

"And then I stopped the bleeding, of course! Head wounds bleed a lot, but they're usually fine if you're not concussed. On that note, what day is it today?"

“May twelfth. I don't think I have a concussion, do I? Don't they hurt and make you dizzy?"

Mercedes -- gentle, wise Mercedes, who always knew just the right answer and (more importantly) had a Red Cross first aid certification -- nodded.

"And how did you stop the blood? There was so much... I really thought I was going to die," Annette continued.

Mercedes pointed to a damp red spot on what was formerly her crisp white top, still on her body. “With this.”

"Huh."

Mercedes helped her up like nothing magical had happened and guided her onto the couch. "You sit there, Annie, and let me get you a bandage just in case!" she said in her usual cheerful tone, as if Annette hadn’t just had a near-death experience (not really) and then quite possibly discovered that her best friend was secretly a witch (really!). 

Lying down on the sofa, Annette could hear soft footsteps on the tiled kitchen floor, and the opening and closing of one cabinet, then another. Then the click of the stove turning on. "I'll make you some tea!" Mercedes called.

"Um, change your shirt first! If you want..." Annette called back. Carefully, she raised her hand to her forehead and felt... nothing. There was no residual blood, no fresh wound, not even a bump. Mercie had stitched her up better than a doctor could, and faster than a doctor to boot. No normal person could make a wound disappear without a trace, vanish into nonexistence.

That was magic, right? That was definitely magic.

There had always been something magical about Mercie, but Annette had never thought that it might be _literally_ magic before this very moment, and now she began to wonder if maybe it was. Mercie’s magic was in the way she always knew when to text Annette just when she was upset about something, the fact that her scones always came out perfectly sweet and crumbly, how she somehow managed to never get sick, even when the flu was going around.

"What's your secret?" she had asked every year, sniffling and sneezing through her homework while Mercedes was fit as a fiddle no matter how often Annette accidentally coughed nearby. She didn't even have allergies.

"I can't get sick, or else who will look after everyone?" she had replied each time, or some variation of that.

She wasn't lying, Annette now realized, but she also wasn't telling the whole truth. It was like that now, too: Mercie had said she had stopped the bleeding, and she had used her top to do it, and had simply declined to say anything about how, oh, also, I made a big bright light with my hand and stitched everything back together. But even if she wouldn't admit it, Annette knew. When you practiced it as much as she did, magic was impossible not to recognize in someone else.

Mercedes had always been a healing presence in Annette’s life. Evidently, she was also a healer.

The rest of that night passed normally enough. Mercie asked her about a dozen times if anything hurt, if she needed anything else besides the tea and a good long rest, and each time Annette assured her that no, everything was fine.

"Better than fine," she said, "I'm good as new. It's like magic!"

She hoped Mercie would admit then that she was right on the mark, but she just smiled her usual serene smile.

...

Now, Annette had something new to confess: something bigger, more important, more pressing. Whether or not her crush was reciprocated wasn't important when Mercedes would care for her deeply as a friend no matter what. But Mercie's magic? That she _had_ to confirm, and fast. She'd spent countless sleepless nights honing her skills, thinking that it was only her, or that even if it wasn't she might never meet anybody else. There were no answers, only questions piling up year after year.

When she’d first discovered her powers, it had seemed like they were something special and beautiful; as time went by, she began to feel alone, this secret heavy on her heart. But now someone who would understand was just within reach, closer than she had ever dreamed.

"Mercie," she practiced, once again to her own reflection, "Do you... have magic?"

"Do you have magic?" "Are you a witch?" "Can you heal, like, really heal?" They were all right, and all wrong; there was no official name for these powers, no single way to describe them. They were just... part of them, a part that was probably impossible to explain to anybody who didn't understand.

Mercedes had always been the one to tell her she had done a good job on her homework, that her made-up songs were lovely, that her roasted vegetables were only a _little_ burnt. Mercedes had been the one to acknowledge the hard work she put into every little aspect of her life, whether it was struggling through math problems she didn't understand or trying to teach herself chores that her mother was too busy to do and her father...

He didn't matter, she tried to tell herself. She hadn't seen him in eight years. If she had told him that she had magic, that she was special, that she was _powerful_ , would he have stayed?

At some point in her reverie, her hand drifted to her forehead, smooth and unblemished as it had been every other time she’d checked. She couldn't heal wounds this neatly. Mercedes could, and probably even more than that. If she so chose, Mercie could leave her bakery job behind and become a doctor, maybe the greatest in the world. And Annette could... help her patients fly kites, maybe.

"Mercie," she whispered, her hand leaving her forehead, back into her lap, "Are you like me, only... better?"

...

She let those thoughts sit with her for a day, then a week, then two weeks. She saw Mercedes just as often as ever, and they still texted constantly, and Annette did her best to make sure everything seemed normal. But it felt like there was a new tension in the air, an unspoken question hanging between them. Mercedes wasn't acting any differently, and Annette hoped that she wasn't either. If she was, she was too polite to say anything about it.

Mercie probably did know, though. Mercie always knew.

It was almost sunset on the day of that two-week mark when the tension broke, though neither of them could have predicted it until it happened. Annette was on her way back from some friday evening shopping, humming a happy tune with groceries in one hand and a bag filled with takeout fried rice and hot and sour soup in the other -- and extra fortune cookies, please. She stopped short at the sound of her name, turned toward the familiar voice coming from the nearby park: Mercedes.

Odd as it was to see Mercie in the wild at this time of day, she followed the sound, easily finding her friend under a tree, looking upward. "Annie!" she said, relief in her voice.

"Mercie! What is it?" she asked, carefully setting her bags down. Mercedes was looking up into the branches _at_ something, Annette realized, and Annette followed her gaze up to a bird that appeared to be stuck or at least unable to move, making a pained shrieking sound that seemed unnatural. "A bird? Oh no... do you think he's hurt?"

"I think he is, he's been up there yelling for ten minutes. I thought about calling someone, but who?"

Already, Annette had her hands on the lowest branches and began to pull herself up. She was wearing jeans, thankfully, and although she hadn't climbed a tree in years the motions came easily enough, powered by sheer determination and adrenaline to help the poor bird and (perhaps more importantly) to help Mercedes. An empath to the core, Mercie was no doubt deeply concerned about the bird’s well-being, and she might have stayed here all night trying to figure out how to help if Annette hadn’t come along.

It wasn’t long before Annette reached a branch in the middle, where the bird was easily in reach. "Hello, Mr. Bird!" she said, ignoring her trembling limbs and the sweat dripping down her face. She made a mental note to go to the gym more often.

The bird did not reply, of course, but let out another odd sound, and when Annette reached out her hand it seemed to not react. Carefully, she put her hand around it -- was this how you held a bird? -- and, unsure of what to do next, placed it into her purse, which she hadn’t bothered to drop with her shopping bags and just happened to be nearly empty.

"Annie, are you okay?" came Mercie's worried voice from below.

"I think so!" she replied, turning to scale down the tree. She made it down safely, more or less, although the last few feet was a drop that she meant to be elegant but instead led to her falling flat on her bottom. Still, Mr. Bird was in her purse, safe and sound or at the very least still making the occasional chirp.

"Do you, uh, know anything about taking care of a bird?" she asked, opening her purse wide for Mercedes to see.

Mercedes scooped up the bird from Annette's purse, giving his head a few gentle strokes. "Poor thing, you must be hurt if you're letting strange people touch you. Can’t you fly away?"

Annette watched her, she herself soothed by Mercedes' soft, even tone. Somehow, it seemed like she would figure out exactly what to do. Come to think of it, if the bird was injured, she already knew what to do.

"I don't know anything about first aid for birds," Mercie admitted.

"You know the part that matters, don't you? You did it for me."

Mercedes paused, then smiled. "You can see right through me, Annie."

And her hand began to glow with that same white light as before, the same light that was a brighter version of what Annette recognized could come from herself. In just moments the bird's shrieks stopped and it sat there in Mercie’s hand in silence. Annette wondered if it was confused, or perhaps he too was made speechless by Mercie's powers. The three of them waited for a moment, unsure of how to proceed; now Mercedes' secret was laid out in the open, and she hadn’t learned Annette’s yet. Then the bird gave a little chirp, and they laughed together.

"He's saying thank you, I think."

"I thought he would be okay, but... well, he's just sitting there now."

"He must be okay," Annette said, choosing her words carefully. There was no way Mercedes hadn't healed him properly; whatever injury the bird had it hadn't been bleeding, or missing any limbs, so it couldn't have been any more difficult than when she’d healed Annette’s wound. "I know your magic is strong, I felt it myself. But... maybe he's scared to fly again, if he was too hurt for it just a minute ago."

"My magic? You say it so calmly, Annie."

In lieu of answering, Annette waved her hand just so, and a cool breeze came from nowhere, carefully aimed to lift up the bird's wings. The bird hovered in the air a moment, and then it seemed to understand, and flapped along as the wind lifted it up into the sky. Soon enough, it was flying on its own power again, off to wherever birds liked to go at night.

Mercedes stared at her, the confusion in her eyes giving way to understanding. "I didn't know...!!"

"Sorry, I never told you. I thought..."

"Oh Annie, that was amazing!" Mercedes said, cutting her off with a hug. Annette was inclined to faint, climbing trees and using magic and getting a hug and being called amazing all at once, but instead she leaned into the hug, enjoying her friend's gentle touch.

"It wasn't much," she humbly replied.

"I knew we had something in common, way back when we first met. Something special that tied us together. Annie... you'll have to tell me all about it."

...

The next few hours felt like a blur as they quickly made their way back to Mercedes’ apartment and enjoyed a long discussion over Chinese takeout. It turned out that it was impossible for either of them to say everything that there was to be said all at once even as they spoke long into the night. Mercie had known about her magic for just as long as Annette, and she had spent nearly as much time trying to teach herself how to use it. Perhaps that was why, she said with an affectionate giggle, they got along so well?

As it grew later, their discussions shifted from the practical -- How long has it been? What can you do? -- to the abstract -- What do you think you _could_ do? How does it feel? -- Annette lost track of the number of complements they showered each other with. Mercedes called her amazing, her powers spectacular, her personal journey to understand herself beautiful.

Annette nodded along with her every word; if Mercedes said so, maybe it was true.


End file.
